On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 5:55 PM, Eric Belanger <belanger@astro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
Packages in extra shouldn't makedepends or depends on packages from community. Xmms is an exception. The person who initially moved it to community didn't checked if it was required by other packages in extra. As I maintain xmms in community and am a dev, we decided not to bother moving xmms back in extra. Plus, it is only required as a makedepends. At least, that's the current state of things.
Then we could "suggest" official maintainers to install packages that are needed for full feature with a comment inside build(). Otherwise offending packages should be documented somewhere, because there's no hint anywhere that such problems exist. The only "automagic" alternative I see is the addition of a crossdeps field in PKGBUILDs. What could it do? A lot of things... notify the user at installation time. Notify the maintainer at compile time. Check if the packager has a "buildcrossdeps" option set in makepkg.conf and, if he does, treat them like makedepends. But I don't know. It is a bit overkill for our situation, but other pacman-based distros that have a different repo structure could make great use of it. Corrado